Ogg Support in Fremantle Extras

In my last post I asked for a wish list of features for the Ogg Support. I started the integration work based on those comments and now the 1.0.5 version for n900 has been promoted to Fremantle Extras repository.

The support for Vorbis audio is good: tags work, File Manager shows them too and knows how to launch Vorbis files in Media Player, etc. Flacs are missing tags but no magic is needed for that, just a new GStreamer element. Theora support is also included. I haven’t tested it much but at least the basic features seem to work.

For now it’s using the libvorbis from xiph.org. It’s not as efficient as possible but it provided the best feature set.

I’m planning to switch to ffmpeg, once Felipe’s gst-av[1] supports tags and streaming (Felipe wouldn’t mind people helping him with those). The performance of ffmpeg’s floating point vorbis decoder is better than the xiph.org’s decoder performance.

Anyway, answering the performance question: at least in my quick measurements of gst-av the battery usage seems to be even less than the official MP3 decoder. I still have to confirm, but at least it’s nothing sort of bad :)

So glad I will be able to immediately fill my N900 with FLAC files once it arrives.

Do FLAC files work directly in the official music player? If so, is the lack of tags going to be a problem there?

I’m kinda hoping the N900 will work as well or better than the iPod Touch for music playback as I do not want to carry both and my iPod is only 8GB. Also being able to add music from my web server while on-the-move is a huge benefit over the iPod.

I will reserve any more questions until I actually have my N900 as there is no point worrying about what it can’t do right now, when you may have fixed the problem by the time I get my hands on one.

The official Media Player won’t show the Flac tags with the ogg-support 1.0.5 release already in extras. But to get them working we only need a flacparser gst element. I’m sure it won’t take very long to get one implemented by the community.

The streaming isn’t tested extensively. I tested couple of ogg streams and they worked. E.g. kohina.org did manage to switch the songs ok. No Ogg tags in streams, and I don’t even know how they should be working.

The playback seems not the be gapless with the Media Player for Oggs. I don’t know how to implement gapless playback but I guess it would need mainly support from the player itself instead of having “gapless support” in the framework.